


What makes us human

by still_intrepid



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 1920s, Asexual Character, Coming Out, Gay Male Character, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 15:33:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19871938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_intrepid/pseuds/still_intrepid
Summary: It’s the oldest joke—stuffy old England and his propriety and his complexes—but the truth is he does find the idea of sex distasteful.  Not in the abstract but in the particular.  Where he’s personally concerned, he’d rather not be.  It’s not that he’s shocked.  When one is thousands of years old, immortal, one has heard pretty much everything.But the other joke: of course, when one is thousands of years old, immortal, one hastriedeverything in that regard, can hardly have failed to…—it’s not a failure; what if you just haven't, what if you don't want to?





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the asexual-hetalia blog on Tumblr

Arthur is not young, of course, but if you’d have seen him that night in Max’s flat in the ‘20s, he looked it. Emerging from the shadow of the War bright, keen, innocent, wounded. The youngest he’s been in centuries.

The other bright young things, artists and visionaries and visions all, in his crowd: men and women in and out of each other’s clothes as well as each other’s beds. And Arthur can follow them so far and no further, and something that’s been seeded for years is yielding a harvest of lonely misery.

Back in the Middle Ages, he’d heard all the songs, the plays, the jokes, courtly love and all—but back then, well, he was a child then. And the bawdy—it seemed closer, more obvious, sex was everywhere, but he wasn’t much interested in romance anyway.

But the age of letters… Of passionately comparing one’s friendship to all the world, saying one would walk to the end of the earth, would drink poison, suffer any pains, merely for a lock of your hair. Pining to touch your lips, to die upon your bosom, to lie across your lap in the lamp-lit evening… that, yes. He felt that.

And to find out that, apparently, that meant something else to everyone else? All that was big and bright and real and warm was only a prelude to the real thing.

* * *

“It was rather shattering a realisation, I admit. It knocked me back.”

Is he drunk? A little, enough. _Bad form_ , he says, gulping down the last of the glass and gesturing with it, and Max laughs softly: _lazy writing: the drunken confession. But go on._ He must go on, now he’s begun.

“And then, there’s… the other part, the part I suppose you know…”

It’s yet frightening to put into words somehow, because in their enlightened circle everything is permitted except _seriousness_. Darling, make love to whomever you like but don’t be maudlin about it! But it is very, very serious.

Because while he’s chums with a few women he doesn’t want to put an arm around them, or take care of them in that way ( _you know: like a child but not like a child_ ), or, or read poetry alone together or watch the sunrise particularly, with any one of them. Though of course he _would_ gladly do any of those things, for any of his friends—the distinction is absolute but still flickering. For no woman he can imagine does he feel the pull towards all the things in the letters and the poems. Towards lifting someone to first importance and with that motion being lifted yourself, ascending together, just you-and-them; towards the _wish_ to hold this one person close while at the same time knowing they are beyond you, beyond everything, beyond the stars. 

Took a while to realise, let alone to accept, that he felt that way about other men.

“Was it anything like that for you?” he asks Max. 

“Mmm. Something like that. Sounds like you worked up the theory first whereas I got thrown straight into the practical. Got a pash for a boy in the upper fourth with ginger hair and an exquisite bowling arm; he used to sunburn something terrible but he was splendid in cricket whites. I found I couldn’t concentrate around him. Everything you said. He was my bright star and I wanted to absolutely die for him—which is a bit thick at thirteen. I stopped short at the point of sending him a bit of poetry—Keats, you know, but it was a close run thing. Never said anything,”

“Ah…”

Max smiles, only a little sadly. “It’s alright now, darling, I got over him.”

Arthur says: “I suppose I thought… kissing—sex—was an overflow, an extension of that.”

“…I mean, mm, it can be; it is, for e.g., myself. Maybe not as linear as that, but...”

“I know!!! Oh God, I don’t mean—” ( _don’t mean that love between men is always or seeks only to be transient and promiscuous…)_

“I know you don’t, I know.” (… _as if men with women mayn’t also be like that!)_

“But it doesn’t… for me it doesn’t seem to be. There’s no line between, no way to… I don’t feel…!”

“Do you want to?” Max asks softly.

“No—no, I don’t know, I don’t know, how should I possibly _know_?!” His mouth works and nothing more comes.

Max hovers a hand in the air above Arthur’s hands, twisting there on his lap, for a long moment to give him time then takes Arthur’s hands in both of his.

“Poor kid. How you’ve tortured yourself.”

To be comforted by this beautiful, unassuming _boy_ of twenty-eight! In all his worldly wisdom. It rather opens the floodgates.

“And I can’t, I can’t, how could I tell anyone—anyone I might care about? How can I tell you?” Arthur’s eyes fly wide and he claps a hand over his mouth.

“You did, though. You did it. It’s alright. It’s alright.”

* * *

“Look, why should anyone be precisely like anyone else I mean? I mean to say imagine,” Max, who is by now at least a little sloshed too, embarks: “It’s as if I were to say, this new piece by Poulenc, it’s simply too life-changing, et cetera, et cetera. But for you, even after a good few listens, it’s just not your sort of thing. Or maybe you find the first two bars of it so very offensive you don’t see the point in going on, well I couldn’t very well make you—”

“—Poulenc’s not _bad_ ,” Arthur sniffs, grudgingly.

“Or that reaction! He’s _not bad!_ Whilst there I was with my passion and changed life and quite evangelical about him, vastly different. Well, he doesn’t catch your soul in quite the same way, what’s to be done? Neither of us is wrong.”

“Yes, dear fellow, I follow your analogy.”

“You follow a fellow, eh?” Max shapes the words with delight and some difficulty. “Hallo, that’s charming. Look, it’s nonsense in any case to say it is the Only thing! Even love, you know. It isn't the only thing. Look at me, well I’m a scrivener by day, I like to think my stories leave _some_ impression. And art! Music! Dance! I should hope no one could see dance as _only_ a kind of mating ritual—even my dancing. What makes us human? What about us _doesn’t_?”

* * *

“—For what it’s worth I don’t think you _were_ wrong, about the letters. How could words like that have only one ultimate meaning. Sex is—it’s just like more words, more expressions, we don’t all use the same ones. But, no, I can imagine how lonely you’ve been feeling not knowing, not telling anyone.”

* * *

They stand on the threshold and then embrace for a long while.

Touching hands, brushed knuckles. Shirt sleeves, strong arms, clasped safe to his chest. How he has dreamt of this. How well he knows this smell of soap and starch, of Max’s cologne or perfume—knows his lipstick and kohl too, on occasion—when after his day’s work is done he dances pale and exquisite in the lime by night. 

No further, no expectation: it is enough.

Maybe some would say Max is only being kind, but how he could love this man for his kindness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so yeah this is my version of a ‘character comes out, another character is supportive and that’s the whole plot’ fluff :p
> 
> SCRIBBLES AND OBVIOUS AND I DON’T CARE it was only supposed to be like a drabble! No background! They’re in Max’s house! Max is a friend of his! it’s night time! It’s the middle of something! No research lately except I’ve been reading Peter Wimsey books so they all talk like this!!! Tbh skip to the dialogue!!  
> Gotta do a thing about the WOMEN later!!!
> 
> There’s added complication of y’know he is nation! that does cause him to hold back, not know, like, you might ask is he in love with Max, is Max with him; I dunno, probably?
> 
> I'm not very happy with the title, but I couldn't think of anything. It was slightly in reference to this poem that goes around on Tumblr, and is lovely and very affecting, though I can't honestly say I've ever had someone say to me that "sex is what makes us human" and that just seems... very out there.
> 
> I sort of only just realised this is probably rather angsty! It's not meant to leave things negative though...
> 
> Some possible follow ups: 1. Max gets married, to a nice girl called Rachel who is of the persuasion that under normal circumstances she wouldn't have wanted to marry anyone, not one for sex, romance, any of that probably. Not only is this convenient but they're great friends.
> 
> 2\. Many years later Arthur reassures a teenage girl he's fostering: yes it's absolutely fine that you don't want a boyfriend when everyone else in your year seems obsessed about that; and yes you might change your mind but it's absolutely fine if you never do.


	2. His friend marries in lavender

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh go on, a little something for a follow-up. Just a bonus scene!

"Is she,” Arthur asks, “mmm, like you?"

Max is wreathed in smiles. "Well, she's an artist and all that so our temperaments are frightfully sympathetic. And, put it this way: she would be most unlikely to consent to wed in the normal course of things. But, in some ways—she's more like you."

* * *

"I shan't... put any expectations on him, or anything."

Rachel isn't what he expected. He doesn't know what he expected.

"I think it would be alright if you did," he says, "I don't mean that sort, obviously, but you've talked obviously and... What will you promise, after all, to be something of all to each other?”

She nods. A real smile lights up her face. “Max is like no one else I’ve ever known. I say he’s my closest friend and no one understands that, but you see I do treasure friendship.” She hesitates a moment and then continues boldly, “It’s not just sex, for me. I never was one for love affairs. They didn’t seem to happen and I didn’t want them to.”

What he didn’t, somehow, expect was the very feminine cut of her dress, her unfashionably long girlish hair. She doesn’t dress a thing mannish, sportive or playful like his chums. He thinks, looking at her you would never know... But then no one can ever know for sure. 

“This may sound silly,” he says, “but I’m reminded of my namesake, Arthur the King. Anyway in the TE White (excepting that bit about Morgan, of course.) For him, it was about Lancelot quite as much as Guinevere, and the _three_ of them were friends—to me that was the tragedy. Arthur never saw it coming because, well. The signs weren't as obvious to him as other people might think.”

“It doesn’t sound silly,” she says, “not to me, obviously. Oh I like that. Poor King Arthur of course, but I do like that.”

He wishes them very very much happiness, and, known by them both, knows he will share in it.


End file.
